From being your main source of fitness inspiration to prescribing you the right exercises to help sculpt your abs and tone your shoulders, a Personal Trainer is an individual who will help you reach your fitness goals. A Personal Trainer may be one of the best investments an individual can make regarding their overall health and well-being for a wide array of reasons which we will delve deep in. They can be defined as walking encyclopedias of exercise-and-fitness-related knowledge – the good, licensed ones at least!

A Personal Trainer is a certified individual with a ‘varying degree of knowledge of general fitness’. He/she is accountable for motivating clients through goal-setting and providing feedback to clients. The goals they set are aligned with what the clients want to achieve through the services. Here are five short reasons why you should hire a Personal Trainer:

Results

A Personal Trainer will deliver results. If you are an individual who has been exercising consistently and rigorously for several months without any evidence to show for, hiring a trainer will change this unfavorable outcome and instead:

• Assess your current program and perform modifications and adjustments to your workouts to improve overall effectiveness and efficiency.
• Motivate you and give you that extra ‘push’; a personal trainer will ensure that you are working comfortably hard enough to produce results; he/she will ensure you don’t slack off!
• Examine if your goals are realistic and if not set new goals that are more sensible and appropriate.
• Teach you properly how to perform a specific exercise and correct any mistakes
• Engrain you the foundation of knowledge of strength and core training

Through the guidance of a Personal Trainer, they may be able to assess your results in ways that you may have not known. An example would be the progress in the gym, how well you are performing each session if you are losing body fat, and so forth.

Don’t know where to start

Stepping foot in a gym by yourself for the first time can be a daunting task! I know this because is what I remember to be my first experience at the gym also. I was shying away from the free-weight area. And I was sticking solely to machines hindering my progress I could have been making. Not that there’s anything really wrong with machines. But if they are your main source of activity in the gym, you should reconsider and hire a Personal Trainer. He/she will inform you why you should perform free-weight exercises with proper technique and form. (e.g. they work your stabilizer muscles, therefore, reduce the chance of injury).

Personal Trainers are packed with knowledge: ranging from flexibility training to improve your ROM, to Weight-Training to help chisel your chest and shape your sitting muscles. There are many elements involved as to what makes a good exercise program. A Personal Trainer knows these elements off by heart. He/she will ensure the right program is written up for you to help reach your fitness goals whether it be weight loss or muscle building, and so forth.

A Trainer will:

• Prescribe to you the right activities and exercises for you. Depending on your body, schedule, or available equipment, a trainer will compile all these elements into one well-written workout program with a wide array of exercises.
• Programming: A Personal Trainer will guide you throughout the entire process, ensuring that we are constantly introducing new stimuli into our body through the form of the different types of training as not to allow our body to adapt and keep it guessing, producing more results through this. As well as also ensuring you are not under or overtraining.
• Engrain the basics of the F.I.T.T. principle which your very workouts are based on F.I.T.T. stands for frequency, intensity, time, and type of workouts you’re doing. You manipulate these elements over time to help reach your goals and provide the right tools to create a personalized program. This principle will demonstrate how often, how hard, how long, and what type of workouts you should be performing in the gym.
• Selection: A Personal Trainer will help you with exercise, weights, reps, and sets, selection.
• Maximize time in the gym: A Personal Trainer will help ensure that your workouts are efficient and packed with enough intensity to say you did your best that day, all in under 50 minutes.

Diagnosed with a Specific Illness, Injury, or Condition

If you have been granted permission by your doctor to exercise, despite having some specific injury or condition, a Personal Trainer can work around this to ensure that you still produce results and are not limited to your condition. An experienced trainer can work with a diverse range of clientele. Some personal trainers have certain certifications and specialties that allow them to work with clients with special needs. This can range from clients with arthritis to chronic back pain conditions.

Even if you are pregnant, a Personal Trainer can cater to your needs and write up a personified program keeping your situation in mind. Furthermore, a Personal Trainer can also help you overcome back or neck pain if this is an issue with you. A Trainer will help strengthen these muscles to help reduce pain in these certain areas. In addition, a Personal Trainer can help clients increase their balance, core strength, and stability if these are areas you’d like to develop. However, if you are diagnosed with a specific illness, injury, or condition you must:

• Get medical clearance for exercise by your doctor otherwise, the Trainer may not be able to train you due to the high risk involved
• Visit a physical therapist if you have pain involved during specific movements. A Personal Trainer may help assist you in strengthening these muscles and alleviate discomfort and pain. This could reduce the risk of injury but is not a replacement for physical therapy of any sort.
• Ensure that your specific trainer is specialized with your specific condition. Ask them about classes, certifications, or licenses. The trainer has acquired to ensure they have knowledge in the field of your certain condition.

Learn to Exercise on your own

Another massive benefit of hiring a personal trainer is that he/she will ensure they engrain the fundamentals and enough knowledge and confidence for you to work out on your own. After a few sessions with a Personal Trainer and you have some slight degree of knowledge of fitness prior to hiring your trainer, you may be able to create your own workouts and want to exercise by yourself. However, beginners may want to stick around for a bit longer. If they are newer to strength training and need practice on the wide array of exercises that can be performed with or without the gym equipment. Here are a few ways in which a Personal Trainer can help you become more knowledgeable and confident:

• Demonstrate the function of each muscle of the body, where it located, and how they work together to produce movement. This allows you to know the name of the muscle groups you would like to develop; such as the shoulders, biceps, gluteus maximus, and so forth.
• Show you the exercises that target the specific muscles you wish to grow, tone, and define. If you want to exercise on your own, a Personal Trainer can show you the movements that will produce the most amount of results for each muscle group. This is crucial information. Furthermore, having knowledge of the variety of exercises per muscle group mixes up your workout and makes it more exciting.
• A Personal Trainer will demonstrate good form on these certain exercises. He/she will give you cues on how to develop and strengthen your form if your technique is not perfect. This is crucial as bad form can lead to injury and cause the wrong muscles to compensate for the movement.

Source of Motivation and Accountability

One of the main reasons why Personal Trainers are hired is to assist you and be of constant guidance throughout your fitness injury. Personal Trainers will motivate you internally (wanting to be healthier) and externally (lose weight to fit in clothes better). A Personal Trainer can be a great motivator at times and can do so by:

• Financially; As you have invested your money to reach your desired goal, you will want to get what you pay for. You will ensure you don’t lose that money by skipping the gym session.
• Through time: A Personal Trainer also is aware that not only are you investing money but your personal time. Therefore, by just showing up, a Personal Trainer is aware of how much your certain goal means to you. And he/she will ensure you reach it.
• Accountability: A Personal Trainer will make sure you are making progress in and out of the gym. They will ensure you are carrying out healthy habits. An example would be drinking enough water throughout the day, getting enough sleep, and so forth. Being accountable for your actions is a great way Personal Trainers motivate you to become healthier, happier, and fitter.
• Standing appointment. A standing appointment ensures that you will make it to the session, and not disappoint yourself and Personal Trainer. Therefore, this is a great motivation to never want to skip your workout.

By: Kaiya Nemish, CPT – Kaiya Nemish Online Training